crop laborers. Another 21 percent are legal immigrants. Together, they make up nearly half of the agricultural workers that provide the nation's food supply. Yet the media is conspicuously silent on these legal farm workers, while devoting copious copy to the interests of their illegal competitors and their employers.

The Agricultural lobby is a powerful opponent of state legislatures who want to verify the legal status of workers or reduce illegal immigration through interior enforcement, both of which the Ag lobby views as a threat to its illegal labor supply. Through the press, they warn readers and legislators of the dire consequences they say will result from the government taking away their illegal workers without giving them expanded access to legal workers. They are particularly active in Florida and Georgia, and most of the local press is unwilling to challenge them. The news coverage from the the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Miami Herald (via News Service of Florida), the Palm Beach Post, and WOKV (Jacksonville) is remarkably similar to the Ag lobby's talking points.

Those outlets rarely, if ever, mention the federal H-2a visa program that provides farmers with unlimited foreign workers for seasonal work. I've seen only one article (from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution) this year that quotes a farmer begrudgingly admitting that he uses the H-2a program.

But the reporter immediately dismisses the program by quoting the same farmer describing H-2a as "cumbersome." Indeed, employer advocates frequently insist that the Obama administration's H-2a regulations - which include minimum wage and working standards - pose an unrealistic burden on farmers. They may have a point, but I have yet to find a story that quotes an H-2a official or H-2a worker on the question of whether the visa holders are too pampered or overpaid. Presumably, none of the reporters I've read have thought to ask.

While the Ag lobby whispers sweet nothings into reporters' ears, the media sends a clear message to legal farm workers: We're just not that into you.

Of course, the press isn't in the sweets and flowers business, but theirs is a harsh Valentine for legal farm workers and their families who have much more at stake than broken hearts.

A February 13 article in the Naples Daily News is illustrative. The reporters showcase numerous "business owners, economic experts, and tourist officials" who weigh in on the E-Verify and interior enforcement proposals before the Florida legislature. Seven sources are cited who are critical of the enforcement proposals, while only one pro-enforcement group is briefly mentioned in support.

None of the sources challenge the claims that taking away farmers' illegal workforce would be "catastrophic," or that farmers "wouldn't have the potential pool of employees to hire from." The H-2a visa program is never mentioned. And anti-enforcement advocates are given carte blanch to blame American workers for illegal immigration: "You're not going to get people in the Facebook generation to go out and pick tomatoes," says a University of Florida history professor, "It ain't going to happen."

And what about the legal workers who are picking our crops? The Editor's Note says the article "is part of a series examining the upcoming legislative session, several proposed immigration bills, and how they will affect business, law enforcement and the people who could face scrutiny." Those are all viewpoints that deserve to be heard.

Tellingly, however, the series will not examine how the bills would effect the citizens and legal workers who stand to benefit. Like so many of their colleagues throughout the fourth estate, the Naples Daily News isn't interested.

The Big Business Lobbyists apparently are getting nearly everything they want from Pres. Obama when it comes to favoring cheap foreign labor over unemployed Americans. However, republicans are no better.

According to a 2009 Obama executive order, government contractors and subcontractors will no longer be obliged to verify all employees working on the government contract. Instead, they will only have to verify those employees who are hired specifically for the contract and are hired after the company receives the government contract. This change will allow illegal aliens to easily acquire government-funded jobs. This, however, looks like a total surrender to the Lobbyists of Greed.

Senator Sessions defends the American worker and criticizes fellow Republicans who are only interested in catering to big business.

A few in our party will argue that immigration reform must “serve the needs of businesses.” What about the needs of workers? Since when did we did we accept the idea that the immigration policy for our entire nation—with all its lasting social, economic, and moral implications—should be tailored to suit the financial interests of a few CEOs?

In general, Religious Globalists believe that the needs of people in the Third World have priority over the needs of people in more advanced nations when it comes to questions of whether migrants should cross borders. Underlying this is the assessment that most would-be immigrants come from conditions that are worse than those for the Americans who may be hurt by their entry.

Powerful appeals for a version of open borders have come in recent years from some high-profile religious leaders who say that although a country has a right to control its borders, workers without jobs have a higher right to cross the borders in search of work. That would qualify hundreds of millions of people around the world to immigrate. Many open-immigration globalists contend that borders and communities are barriers to a just world; any person anywhere in the world should be allowed to go anywhere else in the world if that will advance that person's well-being -- even if it creates a decline of the well-being of residents of the receiving community. The justice of this is based primarily on the assumption that migrants would not move into a community unless the conditions there were better. Therefore, residents of that community can lose some of their standard of living and still not be worse off than the arriving migrant. Global egalitarianism appears to be the goal.

In the end in a democracy, a decision on immigration ought to be made in answer to the question, "What is the right thing to do?"

The ethics of closed-immigration are based primarily on the belief that a country's ethical priority is to its own citizens. To the extent it has ethical obligations to other people, a country should help those people where they reside, not by bringing them into the country and posing harm to its own citizens. Some closed-immigration advocates feel little obligation to helping impoverished peoples in other countries, while other closed-immigration advocates are extremely active in international religious ministries and relief and development efforts in poor countries. But people of this philosophy do not see immigration as being necessary for individuals or nations to show compassion for people in other lands.

Closed-immigration advocates note that the same religions with teachings about the brotherhood and sisterhood of all humankind also include teachings about the creation of just societies based on mutually held responsibilities within the family, tribe or nation. Supporters of closed borders point to what they see as substantial agreement among history's philosophers that a person's moral obligations are greatest for those persons who are closest to them, and to their own descendants. Vanderbilt University philosopher John Lachs has noted that, "Throughout history, acting in self-interest for one's own people generally has not been considered morally selfish."

Government data from its Current Population Survey (and compiled by the Center for Immigration Studies) demonstrate that millions of Americans of all ages and education levels are currently unemployed, while the number of immigrant workers in the United States continues to increase. Other work by CIS has shown that this is the result of a long-term trend where immigrants are being hired at a faster rate than U.S.-born workers.

While the economy is performing better than it was during the depth of the Great Recession of 2008-2009, many millions more Americans are now out of work than in 2007, and millions more who have returned to work have had to take lower paying jobs, or are only working part-time.

The relatively low "official unemployment rate" is masking a far greater problem. The percentage of the working-age population who are employed is the lowest it has been in over 35 years, and as of September 2015 there were 57 million men and women between the ages of 16 and 64 who were unemployed yet classified by the government as "not in the labor force," so they were not included in the calculation of the official unemployment rate.

The federal government does have a broader measure of unemployment which gives a better picture of how many Americans want full-time work. U-6 unemployment rates by age and/or educational attainment for the second quarter of 2015 are listed below (U-6 rate includes individuals who want a full-time job but are unemployed, have given up their job search, or have settled for part-time employment in the interim).

U-6 UNEMPLOYMENT RATES:

All American Citizens

10.3% ages 16+ (15 million)28.2% teens (602,000)21.4% for those with less than a high school education (2 million)13.6% for those with a high school degree only (5.3 million)5.3% for all college graduates (2.7 million) and 8.2% for college graduates under age 30 (570,000).

Black Americans

17.8% ages 16+ (2.9 million)40% teens (96,000)35.2% for those with less than a high school education (431,000)22.2% for those with a high school degree (1.2 million)8.5% for all college graduates (316,000) and 13.3% for college graduates under age 30 (67,000).

Hispanic Americans

14.6% ages 16+ (2 million)39.5% teens (113,000)23.7% for those with less than a high school education (370,000)17.3% for those with a high school degree (752,000)7.2% for all college graduates (196,000) and 11.7% for college graduates under age 30 (70,000).

Foreign workers compete with the laid-off and underemployed highly-skilled Americans in some professions and occupations, primarily in the tech industry, but most foreign workers compete directly in the construction, service, and manufacturing industries where unemployment is the highest and where Americans have the least margin of financial security.

U.S. immigration policy does not automatically adjust to changing economic conditions, and is not a function of U.S. labor market conditions.

Most illegal aliens are unskilled or low-skilled. The Nobel Prize-winning, liberal economist Paul Krugman has written, "Unfortunately, low-skill immigrants don't pay enough taxes to cover the cost of the benefits they receive.” That means American taxpayers must heavily subsidize the costs of services to newcomers. The financial burden on taxpayers occurs in many ways, including those noted below.

Security Secretary, Sarah R. Saldana, testified to Congress on Wednesday that ICE had given away $113 million designated for deportations to other departments, because there were not enough illegal aliens to deport while also admitting that more than 179,000 illegal aliens who have committed crimes are roaming free in the United States.

Ms. Saldana said that most of the releases are due to court orders or because of a Supreme Court case that limits how long illegal aliens can be detained, especially when their own countries will not take them back.

She estimated that there could be as many as 15 million illegal aliens in the U.S., yet acknowledged that deportations have dropped from around 135,000 in 2012 to only around 63,000 in fiscal year 2015.

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) responded to those numbers saying, "You're actually removing less than half as many criminal aliens than you were in just 2011, and you're turning back money you were given for that very purpose.”

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa), Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, added during the hearing that the 179,029 “undocumented criminals with final orders of removal” from the United States currently remain at large across the country and are essentially untraceable.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) said he was “totally dissatisfied” with DHS’s release of illegal criminal alien, Jean Jacques. He was released after serving a 17-year sentence then stabbed and killed a local woman 6 months later. Ms. Saldana said that they were unable to deport the illegal alien because his home country would not accept him and under federal law they could not hold him past his sentencing. The safety concerns presented by illegal criminal aliens gained national attention after the shooting of Kate Steinle that happened in July 2015.

"At a time when they're releasing criminal aliens left and right and there's a surge at the border, they decided to take money from the critical function of detention and removal of aliens, most of whom are criminals, and put it into other functions in DHS. There's no more obvious indication of how much lower a priority the removal of criminal aliens is — or enforcement in general."